Group Finder And Matchmaking

We have not received permission from NyceGaming to share the quoted post.

I'd be okay with Party Leaders having the ability to set a FEW requirements in any 'Party Finder' so that they can filter responses.

e.g. if you're looking for a Paladin, being able to specify 'must have exactly this Body Piece', 'must have this ability at Tier 3', 'must have this much total Elemental Defense', etc.

I think this would possibly HELP with social interactions, if it appeared on the Party Finder.

Scenario A: You can't do this, you get 7 different tanks (this is a Fantasy World don't judge me) all saying they are willing to tank for you, then you have to vet them until you find one (or none) that you feel comfortable actually tanking with, possibly upsetting multiple people.

Scenario B: You can do this, you get who you want, OR you get someone who can look at your requirements, consider 'wait maybe they need this, but I have this equivalent thing/different approach', and then that person contacts you and talks to you about it while already knowing the requirements and can just ask why you need them. Then you just remove the requirements if you agree (admittedly I'm used to something like this already so biased).

Is this 'elitism' or 'gatekeeping' to people? I'm seriously never sure about how this sort of thing is perceived nowadays (I don't play FFXIV, for example, and I have a 'static' for basically everything).

We have not received permission from Arya_Yeshe to share the quoted post.

Having come from a game that did not quite have this but had something similar, here's my reasoning. It will probably seem picky, but I should share the experience anyway.

FFXI has an 'autogroup' function. It also has basically the ability to just 'quick invite' people from far away that match the requirements, and those people are searchable. Here's the thing.

Player A, the Paladin, has their LFG flag up. They aren't looking for a group, they're open to joining one. This leads to the 'blind invite' where the party leader just 'sends the invite outright', and then starts talking if it is accepted.

The result is that the Paladin joins the party and can instantly see the names of the other party members. This is a good thing. If they dislike anyone from that party they can just leave again immediately. If they don't, and they're not too busy, they start moving toward the nearest 'Fast Travel' (usually about 5m away max). And they start talking. In Party chat.

While the Paladin is moving, everyone else can clarify what their plans are, what they need the Paladin to do, etc. But they now need to ask the Paladin some questions about their build. Even in Ashes you would probably want to do at least that, in case of serious incompatibility.

Sometimes you find that such an incompatibility exists during the chatting phase, but this isn't 'social', it's an 'interview' with some questions about 'do you tick these checkboxes for what we need?' That will happen regardless.

The less time that both sides of this interaction spend on the 'checkboxes' portion of the interaction, the better.

That's my opinion. I don't see the point of having a potentially negative/slightly irritating interaction with someone new because it takes 3 minutes of chatting to find out that they specialize entirely in 2Handed Sword and you want a Sword+Shield Tank for some reason (or realistically, something more obscure about augments or abilities).

It can even lead to people 'not liking each other' based on entirely avoidable interactions. If you don't want people to be able to check other people's gear 'basically at will', then the 'requirements' need to be put on the 'Party Leader' interaction side.

Like it or not, a lot of people won't have a ton of time to play and it might overall be better for even socialization if they reduce some of the irritation of 'spending 6 minutes working out details en route from your solo activity only to realize that the group really expected you to have Shield Assault Lv3 and you don't'.

We have not received permission from Arya_Yeshe to share the quoted post.

Oh, my bad, I got confused, in your other thread I'm pretty sure you noted that you did play it but just forgot everything about it.

Maybe your memory's out of phase again? (no mockery no sarc)

I'd appreciate knowing, since I figure there's not as much point bringing up similar stuff (at least not without proper explanations) if you really didn't play it.

Azherae wrote: »

Like it or not, a lot of people won't have a ton of time to play and it might overall be better for even socialization if they reduce some of the irritation of 'spending 6 minutes working out details en route from your solo activity only to realize that the group really expected you to have Shield Assault Lv3 and you don't'.

This is the main reason why I'd prefer if Ashes had a time-based party-finder and make it as easy as possible for people that play in the same timeframe to match up together and create their own "statics".

From my experience that is basically what happens either way, just after a long time of mixing and matching newcomers until you get the best possible setup.

In other words, the game should position itself as a long-time party relationship one, rather than a "pick a rando on the ground and play for an hour together" one.

We have not received permission from Arya_Yeshe to share the quoted post.

That is the carebeariest thing I've ever heard. My god.

We have not received permission from Arya_Yeshe to share the quoted post.

Got it, thanks, I'll readjust and let the others know too (I think you were responding to someone else in the post I misunderstood).

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

At the same time, isn't this a little exclusionary?

Even if we consider that Ashes has a design goal to make this happen, there will still be a lot of people, quite possibly a majority of people, who fight the Winter Dragon because it is there.

And many other situations where you need to get enough people together for something, particularly something not top-end, and you don't have enough people, so you need to recruit wanderers and visitors. I don't think it's good to frame this in such a way that people like CROW3 for example 'wouldn't end up being recruited to help' even for Dungeons or leveling parties.

This definitely comes off to me as 'not caring as much about the wanderers and nomads', those are the people who benefit from the Group Finder the most.